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Kim Jong Il, the North Korean strongman who deepened the hermit kingdom's isolation with a nuclear weapons program that brought on international sanctions, has died at the age of 69, North Korean state television announced Monday morning.

Kim "passed away from a great mental and physical strain" during a train ride at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday, North Korean broadcaster KCNA said, according to South Korean news service Yonhap.

Kim came to power in 1994 after the death of his father, Kim Il Sung, North Korea's founding leader. Kim Jong Il is now expected to be succeeded in turn by his third son, Kim Jong Un.

The dear leader, as Kim Jong Il was called, had been in declining health; he is believed to have suffered a stroke in 2008 and made few public appearances in the last few years.

With a gravity-defying hairdo and a penchant for jumpsuits that emphasized his paunch, Kim was a figure of fun for the international media, but he deftly leveraged the communist country's lone strength -- its potential to upset regional security -- to win economic support from China and South Korea, and vex Western powers.

North Korea's state-managed economy began to unravel with the collapse of its biggest patron, the Soviet Union, and the decline continued under Kim's rule. In the face a major famine in the mid-1990s that may have killed more than a million people, Kim emphasized a military-first policy, channeling resources into maintaining the army and developing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Among the country's biggest sources of income under Kim were weapons sales, as well as reportedly drug trafficking and counterfeiting of U.S. currency, cigarettes and pharmaceuticals.

Little is known about Kim's heir apparent, Kim Jong Un. Believed to be in his late 20s and educated in Switzerland, he was elevated to senior military and political positions in 2010. It's uncertain whether the military is united behind the younger Kim; as Forbes contributor Gordon Chang observed in an essay on the possibility of a power struggle breaking out after the passing of Kim Jong Il, "if the North’s regime is a snake pit—it is one of the most dangerous—then Jong Un is the hamster."

South Korea put its troops and government workers on emergency alert Monday morning, and investors dumped South Korean stocks on worries over what could happen next, sending Seoul's benchmark Kospi down 3% in early afternoon trading.